Research Overview

The blueprint for a healthy life is largely determined by events which take place in the uterus before we are even born. The relationship between a mother and her baby is quite literally, therefore, a partnership for life.

Although most women enjoy a trouble free pregnancy and delivery, some women may experience complications, such as miscarriage, preterm labour, high blood pressure, poor fetal growth, diabetes and difficult or prolonged labour. Unfortunately, we do not always know what causes many of these complications or how best to prevent or treat them. These common pregnancy complications create significant emotional, social and economic costs within our community. Any decline in the incidence or severity of these pregnancy complications significantly reduces these costs. The principal beneficiaries of the outcomes of the research we undertake are mothers and their babies.

The focus of the Pregnancy Research Centre (PRC) is to better understand the causes of pregnancy disorders which compromise the health of mothers and their babies. We are extremely fortunate to be able to undertake our work in a maternity hospital of the size of the Women’s, which cares for more than 7,000 pregnant women each year. Our work on human pregnancy and its disorders ranges from basic biomedical laboratory research through to clinical studies, treatment trials and public health initiatives. Our mission is “to apply contemporary research techniques to the investigation of clinically important problems in maternal and fetal medicine and related fields, promulgate the findings of such investigations and to use such findings as the basis for evidence-based clinical practice”.

Funding

The research actiivities of the Pregnancy Research Centre (PRC) are funded by a variety of intramural and extramural sources. Since its formation in 1993, the PRC has secured over $15 Million in peer-reviewed, competetive national and international funding sources, such as, NHMRC, and NIH.